[HN Gopher] Trying to send a sticker in Steam Chat burned throug...
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Trying to send a sticker in Steam Chat burned through a month of
mobile data
Author : danso
Score : 67 points
Date : 2025-07-18 19:44 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (old.reddit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (old.reddit.com)
| smittywerben wrote:
| For context, Steam has never really supported mobile devices for
| using the Steam store. It kind of makes sense if you think about
| it.
| gowld wrote:
| SteamDeck says what?
| prophesi wrote:
| Steam Deck uses a desktop OS (Arch), and Steam's Big Picture
| mode is well-optimized for controllers.
| mopenstein wrote:
| Everybody on the planet knows that the modern cellphone is
| really just a portable vacuum connected directly to people's
| wallets and steam doesn't want a piece of that action?
|
| They must be raking in the dough if they are ignoring that
| opportunity.
| haunter wrote:
| >They must be raking in the dough if they are ignoring that
| opportunity.
|
| They have monopoly on the whole unregulated digital gambling
| market which makes much much more
| steelbrain wrote:
| I'm out of the loop here. What does gambling here refer to?
| Is it the Steam trading cards?
| wlesieutre wrote:
| I would think "loot boxes" but Steam doesn't have
| anything close to a monopoly on that
| some_random wrote:
| Loot boxes are nothing next to the CS:GO (and others)
| item marketplace
| haunter wrote:
| Counter Strike skins
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling
|
| It's the whole ecosystem, Valve selling keys (making $1b
| in 2023 alone [0]) and the numbers are only going up
| since [1]
|
| On top of that they take a cut form every single
| transaction so even just people selling cases between
| each other makes Valve a fuckton of money.
|
| And there are the 3rd party sites which are running on
| the SteamAPI where people can bet these cases, keys, and
| skins on CS matches. It's an insane system running freely
| without any oversight from anyone
|
| 0, https://insider-gaming.com/valve-cs-cases-earnings/
|
| 1, https://www.dexerto.com/counter-strike-2/valve-made-
| insane-a...
| haiku2077 wrote:
| And the 3rd party sites mostly target children who can't
| gamble at a regulated casino but can get keys through
| gameplay/steam gift cards
| daedrdev wrote:
| Gacha are also unregulated digital gambling, I think steam
| was simply the first
| haunter wrote:
| You can't make money from gacha that's the difference.
|
| I can put real money into Genshin Impact but it's just a
| sink.
|
| In Steam you can actually make money with the skin
| gambling or just by simply day trading. I've built my
| first gaming PC back in 2017 from selling CS cases alone
| (~$800 back then)
|
| I just bought low and sold high and I already had some
| older cases that were going up in price.
|
| Once I had my target achieved, in my case that was +$700
| at least in my Steam account, I bought some very popular
| CS knives, iirc 3 with each of them going +$250
|
| Then moved those knives to a 3rd party gambling/trading
| site (thanks to the SteamAPI provided by Valve).
|
| And then sold the knives there for real money and cashed
| out with simple bank transfer.
|
| Few days later bought my first gaming PC.
|
| Nothing have changed ever since and you can still turn
| your Steam account money into real cash with 3rd party
| sites.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think it is reasonable option to not compete in those
| markets largely controlled by existing players.
|
| Especially when they really are rolling in money from selling
| desktop games. Taking 20% and courts most likely won't stop
| them as they do not control the platforms.
| Farbklex wrote:
| Yeah, that is strange, especially since we now have the
| technology to actually play full blown PC versions via
| abstraction layers on Android phones. A steam store with
| existing games on mobile is now possible.
| morsch wrote:
| There's a Steam app that's basically the store?
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Does it make sense?
|
| The PS5 ecosystem lets you buy games from your phone and your
| console will autodownload it for you.
|
| Maybe the Steam store is just too big of a legacy clusterfuck
| to make mobile friendly. It never worked all that well even on
| desktop, especially on macOS. It's probably the most sluggish
| web app I've ever used.
| esseph wrote:
| I'm looking at the steam store via the mobile app on my
| android device. If I load up my Linux desktop and the steam
| app, it seems fine between the two.
|
| Honestly I've been a steam user for.. idk how long, 15 years?
|
| I can't say I've ever had a major issue with it, maybe I've
| been lucky.
|
| Edit: Seems to be the chat app that causes this for the
| author in question.
| Rohansi wrote:
| You can buy Steam games and download them to your PC from
| your phone, too. Only problem is the website isn't designed
| specifically for mobile. Most pages work well but use a lot
| of data to pull media.
| dsizzle wrote:
| fwiw the substack app did this to me too
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| They were browsing the point shop. On Desktop (FF ctrlF5) this
| page loads 20-30MB of data. A mix of gif webm and animated pngs
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/points/shop
| jorvi wrote:
| This is one thing that Telegram did right with their .tgs
| animated sticker format (based on Lottie) and that somehow no
| one else in the message space seems to want to take the effort
| to replicate.
|
| JSON and vector-based, heavily optimized for filesize and
| battery use.
| keyringlight wrote:
| I wonder if it's a consequence of Valve's core business is
| dealing with delivering data for games regularly in the 10's
| of GB range, they assume most of their customers are on
| connections good enough for game downloads so they must be
| using the store and chat via the same. I guess if it's not
| unpleasant enough for a large group of people to prevent
| commerce from happening, then it's not worth putting
| engineering effort into (or however they allocate effort at
| Valve now).
| Ekaros wrote:
| Also Valve has relatively small workforce. That being only
| couple hundred. With good part working on two of the most
| popular games. And then other projects. In the end they
| don't have that much idle hands.
| keyringlight wrote:
| I'd have some sympathy for this if they weren't the
| biggest fish in the pond with huge "make it happen"
| resources at their disposal. They have the potential
| available to do almost anything they want if they decide
| to, and at this point it's a conscious decision not to.
| jorvi wrote:
| No, it's Valve just not giving a hoot.
|
| People don't seem to (want to) remember, but before the
| run-up to the Steam Deck, Valve was really coasting.
|
| Big Picture was riddled with bugs. Controller configuration
| was riddled with bugs. The Steam in-game overlay was
| terrible, and had been terrible for years. Their internal
| browser was a custom stripped down 5+ years old Electron or
| Chromium Embedded Framework monstrosity, begging to be
| exploited somehow. Chat and voice chat was terrible, didn't
| scale properly and was missing many of the features of
| things like Discord.
|
| And things had been stagnant like that for 7 years, if not
| more. Their built-in browser and chat functions are still
| terrible. In regards to chat and voice, I hope they cave
| and add Discord integration, so we finally have one service
| for PC, Xbox and Playstation.
|
| Their store was and is still all webviews, the pages
| themselves are terribly optimized and many of them aren't
| even controllable on the Deck without touch. You read that
| right, the Big Picture cursor doesn't work on some store
| pages, which renders them unusable on handhelds without a
| touchscreen / hardware (emulated) mouse.
|
| Steam is miles ahead of the Epic or GoG UX, but it still
| has lots of warts.
|
| Steam Input controller bind customization is off-the-map
| nuts with how broad it is now though, major props for that.
| And the 'new' Big Picture is a vast improvement.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Just scrolling up and down on this loads another 30MiB every
| cycle. No visible change.
| msgodel wrote:
| Steam has always been a pig with data.
|
| When I used to live with my parents I specifically bought the
| physical Orange box so I could play portal and half life without
| having to download anything over the horribly slow and metered
| satellite connection.
|
| Steam immediately forced a multi-day process of downloading and
| updating steam, then downloading and updating portal, before I
| was able to launch the game and have it crash from broken GMA950
| drivers.
|
| I buy maybe one game a year these days but I always buy it from
| GOG pretty much because of that experience.
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| I had to learn that same lesson with Civ 5.
| Fogest wrote:
| The huge amount of data steam used on the store that people are
| pointing out in the reddit comments makes me wonder if this is
| why I am having so many problems on their store. For the last
| half year or so I have found that Steam store pages load very
| slow for me. It feels like I am loading in their pages on dial-
| up. I have been suspecting it could be my ISP throttling the
| Steam connection, but no other download/streaming service or
| anything seems to have this same problem. And going on a VPN or
| different browser doesn't resolve the problem.
|
| I wonder if the issue is simply that it is loading a ton of data
| and my connection just isn't fast enough. Time to monitor the
| network traffic while browsing Steam I guess.
| esseph wrote:
| Try the steam website and see if you have the same problem?
| Fogest wrote:
| The funny thing is that it actually works fine for me on
| their mobile app, which is the same app this post talks about
| with the poor data usage.
|
| It just seems to be on my PC. It's only on the store. Even
| download speeds seem okay. But regardless of whether I use
| the client, Brave, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, they all are slow
| for the store page. Even things like the community pages and
| workshop all load fine. It makes zero sense to me why things
| like pictures/videos in their store load insanely slow for
| me, yet the images in things like the workshop have zero
| problem.
|
| I've been trying to figure out what is wrong for quite some
| time and haven't figured out what could be causing it.
| esseph wrote:
| Have you moved to a different locality since you've had a
| steam account?
|
| Steam -> Settings -> Download -> Region
| spondyl wrote:
| Not to beat on frontend but I vaguely remember that the UI was
| rebuilt with React a couple of years back and the other day
| while browsing a sale, specifically hovering over Final Fantasy
| XIII would crash an entire sales widget, printing out a React
| error. I wonder if this is just a case of framework bloat
| getting out of hand (again)
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| People give React far too much credit.
|
| Source: I've had the privilege to ask questions to some of
| the engineers on that team...
| Fogest wrote:
| It could be, or maybe poorly optimized assets? I always have
| such a problem loading the pictures and videos associated
| with each game.
|
| I've used other sites that are fully React based that run
| quite well and don't have these issues. So I can't imagine it
| is specifically the frameworks fault.
|
| But I do find if developers use these big frameworks and
| don't use them properly, the slowdowns can be much more
| pronounced.
| benoau wrote:
| I wonder wtf is in the 200+ megabyte installer that has to
| download every other day if not the data the store needs...
| Ekaros wrote:
| Downloading the same browser engine that everyone else uses
| too time and time again as more bugs and security issues are
| found in it...
| Fogest wrote:
| Wait, when is this occuring? I don't recall any installer
| downloading every other day. Is this something from maybe
| being on the beta branch of Steam or something? Or am I just
| missing this?
| benoau wrote:
| Feels like every time I open Steam I'm waiting for the
| latest version to unpack...
| Fogest wrote:
| Oh, that's odd. But I also have Steam launch at startup
| so maybe it's doing something in the background before I
| open it. I don't think I've really ever seen this
| unpacking thing unless I maybe am installing a Steam
| client update periodically
| LorenDB wrote:
| Why are ISPs apparently limiting some plans to just 1 GB of data?
| That's not nearly enough for 2025.
| toast0 wrote:
| For mobile data, if you have access to immobile data at home
| and work, 1GB is reasonable if you're not streaming while
| you're out.
|
| If it's 1GB hard cap, you might have some bad months, but 1GB
| fast data and unlimited slow data is totally doable.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _For mobile data, if you have access to immobile data at home
| and work, 1GB is reasonable if you 're not streaming while
| you're out._
|
| The people who are downvoting you must be terminally online.
|
| Like you, I use wifi at home and work. My mobile data use is
| typically around 150MB/month.
| gylterud wrote:
| Not downvoting, but any typical online activity during
| commute or while travelling will blow through 1GB. Music
| every day, or a video once in a while...
|
| I also have WiFi at my usual hangs, but thus far this month
| I am on 15GB of my 50GB monthly plan. Sure I could pre
| download music or videos to watch, but it would be much
| more of a hassle. And some sites, like twitch, don't really
| have an option to download.
| Rygian wrote:
| Lack of real market choice for consumers.
| dbspin wrote:
| I get 120GB a month 'fair use' on my 20 euro a month plan here
| in Ireland. If I exceed that, my speed is slowed down, but
| internet continues to work. In other words, its not something I
| need to think about. These kinds of plans seem to be ubiquitous
| everywhere in the world now - with the exception of the USA,
| Canada and Australia / New Zealand.
| ragazzina wrote:
| I get 150GB for EUR8 in Italy but my ISP is trying to
| convince me to move to 200GB/EUR10.
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| Because some people do not waste money?. I pay 1EUR for 1GB of
| data. Most of the time I use 0MB. Germany.
|
| If it did not take 1 day to activate I would cancel every month
| and only pay when I actually have a need.
| autoexec wrote:
| what is the point of a digital sticker? What are you supposed to
| stick it to?
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| At one point, your Counter-Strike guns.
| autoexec wrote:
| Wow, I looked it up and it's depressing that people are
| paying money for that at all but some of the prices are
| insane. What a scam. I'm surprised there isn't a bunch of
| mods letting people add them for free/design their own.
| vel0city wrote:
| Can't really run mods if you're on official matchmaking
| servers. Even if you did modify the textures locally, those
| textures wouldn't show up for everyone else. A part of this
| is so other people can see the skins/stickers/farkles
| you've added to your gun collection.
| ang_cire wrote:
| Actual answer is your chat window. The steam app has a friends
| chat function, and "stickers" that are often game-specific
| images or gifs, can be sent, e.g. [1] this bouncing sheep from
| Mabinogi:
|
| [1]: https://imgur.com/a/N4LE2lx
| autoexec wrote:
| At 600+ MB that must of been an amazing gif...
| ang_cire wrote:
| Chonky sheep, chonky data
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Steam has an enormous amount of headway, and I'm a massive fan of
| what they've done... but they're going to lose ground with their
| laissez-faire development practices, I run into random issues
| like this all the time with the store.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Have not checked GoG galaxy lately, but maybe it is my
| stockholm syndrome. But other stores do not really feel better.
| That is Epic, Ubisoft, Xbox... Haven't checked EA lately, but
| that was also a mess flipping between Origin and EA
| something...
|
| Seems, like simple efficient store and download manager should
| be solved issue. But what do I know...
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Yeah really Steam continues to succeed because everyone else
| is so bad at it, and the smaller players don't have the
| benefit of getting in early. Epic and Microsoft are maybe the
| best positioned to pull if off, but they've done a lot of
| fumbling so far.
| leshokunin wrote:
| Would you say you were delighted?
| ars wrote:
| The big companies really don't seem to care about low bandwidth
| users.
|
| I attempted to use Teams website once over a very low speed
| hotspot. It utterly failed. It just kept reloading the same
| resource over and over and over, maybe it didn't wait long
| enough? Not sure. But it never worked.
|
| I then tried the teams app, and that was no better. It would get
| stuck on the main screen and couldn't go any further.
|
| So then I tried outlook, desktop client. Total fail there as
| well, it couldn't seem to manage to download a couple emails.
|
| I finally resorted to ssh and using a command line.
|
| I feel like a old man screaming get off my lawn, but it really
| seems like the new programmers need to use old computers for a
| while and learn how to be more efficient.
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